It was, indeed, a quietly brilliant movie, and, remembering the photographs I had seen the night before, Simon Crowley’s fate seemed continuous with the bleak vision of Mr. Lu. Crowley’s death was now, oddly enough, a small matter of grief for me. Cultural hype aside, here had been someone with something to say.
At two, sobered by the movie, I rode the elevator up to Caroline Crowley’s apartment with Sam Shepard. He was going a couple of floors higher, perhaps visiting someone equally glamorous. He stared ahead, hoping not to be recognized. He was still handsome yet looked like hell, the skin loose under his chin, the eyes tired. He saw me staring at him.
“Hey, man.”
The elevator opened then, and I stood in front of the black door for a moment, feeling odd that I was here again, not twelve hours after staggering out the previous night. It was both strange and deeply logical to me; our compulsions are always evident to us, I think, even if we fear them.
Caroline pulled the door open as soon as I knocked, her hair tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in jeans and a white cashmere sweater.
“I rode up in the elevator with Sam Shepard,” I said.
“He’s got a friend upstairs.”
The apartment was filled with pale winter light and seemed larger than it did the night before. I saw fresh vacuum-cleaner tracks on the carpet.
“I made us a little lunch,” Caroline said.
I followed her into the dining room, where a spread of soup and sandwiches was laid out on a long mahogany table. In the middle of the table was a bowl of the largest oranges I had ever seen.
“Last night—” I began.
“Last night was just right,” she interrupted.
I didn’t know what she meant.
“You weren’t expecting to meet me,” she said. “I saw you across the room and just thought I’d talk to you. I know it’s—it’s strange, but I figured you had heard about every crazy story people can tell and this was very—well, you have to understand my—Charlie—is very much of a businessman, very dependable and everything, but not much interested in what happened with me and Simon …” She took an orange from the bowl and began to peel it. “I guess I have a little problem, and it’s pretty embarrassing.” She lifted her eyes. “I mean, if it was just embarrassing, then it wouldn’t be a big deal. But it’s more than that.”
We did not know each other, but already a strange intimacy existed between us. She seemed to feel a great pressure to tell me certain things, some essence of a predicament, and it occurred to me that perhaps she had decided that these were things her fiancé might be better off not knowing. For if she could tell him, then why would she need to tell me? I also was beginning to wonder whether Caroline Crowley might simply be lonely. Not in the sense of unaccompanied, for a woman such as she would always be accompanied, but fundamentally solitary; I wondered, too, if she did not trust herself to keep out of trouble. She was bright and beautiful and yet appeared unmoored. That she wanted to tell me of her “little problem” was proof of the randomness of her life and, I suspected, proof that her problem was not little at all.
Caroline began to move the plate of sandwiches around. “Last night you may have noticed that the articles I showed you on Simon don’t mention me: See, we didn’t have a public wedding, and also I didn’t meet him until just about the end of his life. The fact that we were married came out after he died, and I just flew to Mexico and stayed a few months in order to avoid the television people, people like that.”
“People like me.” I took a sandwich. “Ratlike journalists.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“How did you and Simon meet?”
“By accident.” She separated each section of the orange, then laid them out in a line, eight pieces. “At the time, I was—I’d been around, if you know what I mean. I’d been here a few years …” She paused, and in the gesture I was given to understand that there was a story that preceded her arrival to New York, but she seemed to push it away in order to concentrate on what she was telling me. “I was living a sort of tired, pretty-girl New York life, you know? I had almost no money and I was … there were always regular guys sort of around, but I was tired, I’d been to a lot of parties and everything … I’d been out in California, but I’d come to New York just to see it, see something different, you know.”
I nodded my vague understanding. Only later would it be clear to me that Caroline was offering an absurdly simplified, barely truthful version of why she had come to New York City; only later would I see that the reasons for her change of venue ran deep into her past and that the effects ran up to that very moment. But now, watching her fiddle with her orange peels, I knew only that she seemed distracted by anxiety.
“I guess I had been in the city long enough that I knew I had to get serious about something,” she was saying. “I mean, this is a hard place. You have to know why you’re here. If you don’t know that—”
“You’re in big trouble.”
“Yes, you’re in big trouble, because you’ll get pushed into something or just eaten up somehow. That happened to a girlfriend of mine. She started smoking crack and I just never saw her anymore, and then she showed up and was really thin and sick, and we had to send her back to Texas on a bus.” Caroline pushed an orange section between her teeth. “So at the time I didn’t have work, and I went to an agency and got a job answering phones at a law firm, at the front desk, and I could sort of scrape along on that. I’d been there about three days when one of the attorneys, one of the older ones, asked me if I would join him for a drink after work. He was very important and everything, but he was just some kind of regular guy—he wouldn’t have understood anything about me … I wasn’t even looking for anybody, I had dressed very conservatively and hadn’t put on too much makeup. I just didn’t want to be noticed, I wanted some stability, and anyway, he asked me out, and there he was in his suit and gray hair and everything, maybe forty-five, and he looked sort of pleased with himself, like he had just made a million dollars or something, and for all I know he had, and actually he was sort of attractive, but … well, I had seen some people in California who were pretty unusual … I said that was very nice but I couldn’t do it. So, he was a lawyer, after all, so he wanted a rationale, and he asked me if it was a matter of availability or a matter of preference. That was how he put it. I was sort of angry, and I said preference.” Caroline bit a piece of orange. “The next day, the lady who was the head of personnel fired me when I came back from lunch. She said it just wasn’t going to—”
“He’d told her to do it.”
“Of course. I just got up and left, and I walked south from Midtown, just walked and walked, at least an hour—you know how that can feel good on a cold day—and I was just walking along and went into a crummy bar down on Bleecker Street. It was warm inside. I decided to sit and think and then Simon came in—he was easy to recognize, he didn’t look like anybody else. I’d seen his films. In fact, I’d seen Mr. Lu twice. He was alone, and he saw me sitting there and came over and asked me if he could buy me another drink, and I said yes and we talked for a while. I thought that he was even uglier than what I’d seen of him in the media. Shorter, kind of meaner-looking, with cowboy boots, which look stupid on a city guy. But we had a pretty good conversation. He wanted to know about my childhood.” She ate another orange section. “Specifically if there was a laundry line in the backyard, with T-shirts and underwear and jeans drying on it, and that was funny, but I said yes, in fact, we’d had a laundry line like that. Both our fathers had done physical labor … my stepfather was a trucker. I wondered why he was paying such attention to me.”
“Hey.”
“Well, all right, but Simon always had a lot of women around after his films started to make it big. I’d read about him in the magazines, and actually I’d figured he was an asshole like a lot of people in Hollywood … but it wasn’t like that, really. In the bar we just talked. Then Simon said he had to leave—some people were waiting for him
uptown. Sharon Stone or somebody. I thought that was it, end of conversation. But then he pulled up close to me. He said he was going to ask me a question, one crazy question, but that he was serious. A simple yes or no would do.” Caroline stared directly at me, her blue eyes daring me not to believe her. “He said that was all he wanted as an answer. Yes or no. I said okay. So Simon said, ‘I want to marry you.’ I thought he was crazy and almost laughed. Then I realized he was serious and we didn’t say anything. I just looked out the front window of the bar and thought about how ugly he was, but also how smart he was, and that was probably the thing that was so attractive. Then I just said it—I said yes.”
“You met him in a bar, he proposed, and you said yes?” I asked. “In the space of less than an hour?”
“Yes.”
“That’s the most ridiculous story I ever heard.”
“I agree.”
“But I guess pretty romantic, too.”
“No,” she corrected, “it’s totally crazy.”
“But you did it.”
She nodded. “He wrote down all his phone numbers for me and got my address and said he had to go meet some people now, he was extremely sorry, but that I would hear from him the next day. I thought maybe he would kiss me or something, but he just left. There was a car waiting for him outside. When I walked out maybe fifteen minutes later, there was a car waiting for me. He’d had his driver call another car.”
I had finished my lunch. Caroline took another orange from the bowl and handed it to me. “These are good,” she said.
“What happened after that?”
“I went home to my apartment in the car and didn’t know what it all meant or whether I should take it seriously. I sort of stayed around the phone that night, but he didn’t call. The next afternoon I got a package that had been sent from Los Angeles that morning, and it was from Simon. It was a tape and an engagement ring … and then I really didn’t know what to think. I mean, it was weird and sort of wonderful, too. I’ll show you the tape, if you want.”
“This is all leading somewhere?” I asked.
“I promise.”
“I mean, it’s interesting, don’t get me wrong—”
“No, no, you’ll see.”
We went into the living room, and she put a videotape labeled LOOK AT ME CAROLINE [TAPE 11] into the machine. “You have to understand that Simon wasn’t a regular person,” she said. “He was obsessed with these little tapes. Obsessed. He didn’t like to write anything except scripts, and so he would make these tapes. Like diaries. He made all kinds of tapes. I mean, this was his big thing—movies were the highest art, the image had killed print, stuff like that. He had a whole philosophy … well, I’ll just start this.” She drew the shades, plunging the room into darkness, and then sat down on the big sofa next to me and rolled a cigarette while I watched.
[The static ends, an image appears: a chair and table in a kitchen in an expensive home. A window in the background is dark, and a digital clock reads 1:17 A.M. A few seconds go by, and then there is a sigh audible off camera. Then the backside of Simon Crowley appears as he walks toward the chair, carrying a cigarette and ashtray. He is a small figure, skinny, soft in the gut. He sits down and stares at the camera and then past it, his eyes calm. His dark hair flops across half his face, and from time to time he pushes it back. His face is somehow misshapen, the lips and nose too large. Yet the eyes are bright with perception, ready with thought. He sighs again, slowly.] Okay. Hey there, Caroline, I’m back in Bel Air, got in from LAX maybe an hour ago. The whole time on the plane I thought about being married to_ you. I kept thinking about it, and there was one thing that bugged me: I think I’m uncomfortable with the regular vows—whatever vows we decide to use. In fact, you decide and I’ll go along with them. It’s not the ceremony, or the language, it’s that I’m—as you know—I have a copious appetite to say things, Caroline, and “I do” will not do. It just won’t do. [He drags on his cigarette, his eyes squinting at the effort, almost as if he is drawing his next thought directly from the burning tip itself.] So the reason I’m here tonight, something like thirteen fucking hours after we just met, is that I want to make my vow to you now, this exact minute. It’s better for me this way. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say, but when it’s all said and done, it will be my wedding vow. And I’m videotaping it. Obviously. Forgive me that, if you can. I suspect that you’ll have to forgive me for a lot of things. [Looks down, smiles to himself. Takes a drag.] So after I said good-bye to you I had dinner with Sharon Stone. She wants to be in my next movie. We talked about it. She still looks pretty good. It was just a regular conversation. I mean, I was there talking to Sharon Stone and I was thinking of you, some girl I just met, right? Some girl at the bar that afternoon. The beautiful Sharon Stone didn’t interest me. I didn’t get the click from her. I got the click from you, Caroline, I got the click in a way I have not gotten the click in a long, long time … And then I was thinking of you, Caroline, and I remembered when I worked as a busboy as a kid. I told you this afternoon that I was a busboy, but I’ve never really told anybody what happened to me, stuff I learned … [He pulls a pack of matches out of his breast pocket and fiddles with it.] You know, I was living in my dad’s house in Queens, still in high school. I was going to so many movies, like four or five on Saturdays, and renting them, too, that I didn’t have any money. My father wanted me to get my elevator electrician’s license, but that wasn’t for me. I helped him anyway. The union said I could be called a temporary apprentice. I went with him on his service calls sometimes. He had a lot of small accounts, old buildings downtown, wherever. But I didn’t want to spend my life doing that. So I needed to get a job, and I got one as a busboy at this place called Dante’s Café, which used to be down in the Village before it went out of business. I liked working in the Village, because of all the alternative movie houses. I could get off at eleven and still catch a show. Pretty soon I realized how hot the place was, how a lot of the TV people and writers in New York used to go there, even some pro athletes, Darryl Strawberry when he was still big, people like that, and models and Japanese women carrying little black purses. People were always taking pictures with instant cameras and passing around the photos, doing an instant mini-hit of fame thing … [He gets up and wanders away. Behind him the kitchen clock reads 1:21 A.M. He comes back with another cigarette and lights it.] Getting this job was a big thing. I could watch the people. I could understand how you acted if you were rich and famous. Of course, I was nobody, I was just some skinny busboy. It was hard work. At the end of every shift I smelled like garbage and cigarettes and every kind of stuff mixed together, sticky on my arms. After a while I got to know who the regulars were and if they needed a menu or an ashtray, whatever … I was invisible. I was just a kid in a white shirt with a bow tie. Sometimes the models who came in were so beautiful that I went into the restroom and jerked off. I had to. I could do it standing up in, like, twenty seconds. One time I was doing it and a rat came out of a little hole that led to the storage room. I saw the money that was being spent. A couple of people would blow a few hundred bucks on food and drinks. I was making decent tips and I bought a video camera. I used to just walk around filming things, people having arguments, the barges moving up the river, whatever. I’d been working at Dante’s for maybe a year when this very beautiful model started coming in—her name was Ashley Montgomery. Everybody has forgotten about her now because she ended up marrying, like, the richest man in Kuwait. She was tall, with practically the best ass in America and long straight black hair, and she was perfect. For six months she was on the cover of everything. In my own private dialogues, I defied anyone to find a more beautiful woman. But it would be a mistake, a pitiful mistake, to say that I loved Ashley Montgomery as soon as I saw her walk into Dante’s that first night. [He shakes his head in wry disgust.] We can assume the oboe music in the background and the laughter and the little tables. We can assume that her entrance into my consciousness was const
ructed with the cunning of the devil. [He seems to have entered a fugue state, living within conjured memory.] Yes, we can assume that. But it’d be wrong to say that I loved her instantly. No, that would be insufficient terminology, which is what lawyers complain about when they are hammering out movie contracts. It would be insufficient to say that I loved Ashley Montgomery. She killed me. I mean that. In a certain sense, she killed me. Ashley Montgomery killed me. She did not see me … [He is no longer looking into the camera but instead, the smoke lifting and curling about him, is staring off to one side, the light from the lamp unrelentingly stark upon his strange features.] I can remember all of it—her eyes swept across the restaurant as she came in, looking for other people, the real people, not the filler. But she didn’t see me. She just did … not … see me. I understood this in the same way that I understood I was fucking breathing. I mean, most people looking across a room, when they meet the eyes of someone looking back at them, they do one of two things—they either meet the gaze of the other person and hold it, if even for a heartbeat, or they blink as they shift their eyes away. The blink is the physiological transition. It is all. It is volumes. It says, “I am moving on, what I see does not interest my eyes.” It is proof, however, that something has registered … [He closes his eyes and draws in a breath, inhaling the memory back into his head. His eyes open.] But Ashley Montgomery did not blink when she looked away from me. Why? I was not there. I was a spoon in a fucking coffee cup, I was a thumbprint on the fucking wallpaper, I was the dust filtering imperceptibly through the gloom of the place. I was not fucking there. She killed me. I used to go home and cry on the subway. Sometimes, if I was in the kitchen and she was outside at one of the tables, I would force myself not to think of her by cutting myself a little with one of the vegetable knives. Just a tiny slice … a stigma. It never worked. I even cut a tiny piece of skin off my penis in the men’s room. Just to see how much I loved her. When she came in I would pay another busboy to switch tables with me. I saved her cigarette butts. I kept a Ziploc bag in my pocket. There was a similar pattern of lipstick to each … I remember this, too—the ring of lipstick was uneven, and it began about a quarter inch in from the end of the filter. Different shades. I realized that the lipstick would be coordinated with what she wore. If she came in one night in a black dress, then the lipstick would be deep red. If a lighter colored dress, then lighter … I think everybody is a fetishist. Ashley Montgomery wore about six shades. I was thrilled when I found a—
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